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Christoph Schlingensief.

Christoph Maria Schlingensief (born October 24,
1960 in Oberhausen) is
a Germanfilm and theatre
director, actor and author.
Because of his often controversial work he has often been called a
"scandal-maker".

Contents

Career

As a young man he organized art "events" in the cellar of his
parents house and artists such as Helge Schneider or Theo
Jörgensmann performed in his early films.

Schlingensief considers himself a "provocatively thoughtful"
artist. He has created numerous controversial and provocative
theatre pieces as well as films, his former mentor being filmmaker
and media artist Werner Nekes. One of his main works, the so-called
Germany-Trilogy, which deals with three turning points in 20th
century German history: the first movie Hundert Jahre Adolf
Hitler (Adolf Hitler - A Hundred Years) covers the last hours
of Adolf Hitler, the second Das deutsche
Kettensägenmassaker (The German Chainsaw-Massacre), depicts
the German reunification of 1989 and shows a group of East-Germans
who cross the border to visit West-Germany and get slaughtered by a
psychopathic family with chainsaws, and the third Terror
2000 uses the theme of the 1970s Red Army Faction terror. His films
have been compared to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film,
Hitler, A Film from Germany.

In 2004, at the invitation of the Wagner family, he directed
Parsifal at the
Wagner-Festspiele in Bayreuth, creating highly original images for
the opera. This came as a surprise as Schlingensief has targeted
the legacy of the Third Reich in German and Austrian identity.

One of Schlingensief's central tactics is to call politicians
bluff in an attempt to reveal the inanities of their "responsible"
discourse, a tactic he calls "playing something through to its
end". This strategy is most notable in his work Please Love
Austria at the time of the FPO and OVP coalition in Austria, a
work which attracted international support, a media frenzy and
countless debates about art practice.

Schlingensief has also directed a version of Hamlet, subtitled,
This is your Family, Nazi-line, which premiered in
Switzerland, the so-called neutral territory equated with the
Denmark of the opening line in Shakespeare's play where there is
something foul afoot. Events around the piece questioned and
attacked Switzerland's "neutrality" in the face of growing racism
and extreme right wing movements. It also involved former members
of Neo Nazi groups, allowing them to play out their own weaknesses
in the terms of the characters in the drama, and led to him
founding a centre for former members to "de-brief".

Schlingensief's work has covered a variety of media, including
installation and the ubiquitous "talk show" and has in many cases
led to audience members leaving the theatre space with
Schlingensief and his colleagues to take part in events such as
"Passion Impossible, Wake Up Call for Germany" 1997 or "Chance
2000, Vote for Yourself" in which he formed his own party where
anyone could candidate themselves in the run up to the federal
election of 1998 in Germany. With his demands for people to "prove
they exist" in an age of total TV coverage and "act, act, act" in
the sense of becoming active not "actors", his work could be
considered a direct legacy of Bertolt Brecht, as it demands
involvement as opposed to passivity and merely looking on as is the
case in traditional text-based theatre. In an age of extreme media
fatigue, his is a fresh voice albeit and undisputedly containing
echoes of the past, often humorous and subversive yet never
cynical. His influences include Joseph Beuys and his idea of social
sculpture, and artists Allan Kaprow and Dieter Roth.

Projects

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1990s

1990-1993 he directed a series of films known as the
Germany-trilogy.

1993 he directed his first stage piece "100 Years of CDU " at
the Volksbuehne Berlin

1994 Kuhnen "94, Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler! at the Volksbuehne Berlin